Meticulous illustrations of birds are much more than works of art

In 1812, John James Audubon filled a wooden box with about 200 of his paintings of American birds and left it with a relative for safekeeping while he went off on one of his many trips. When he returned to retrieve the paintings, he discovered to his horror that they had been destroyed, shredded by nesting rats.

As he described it later, his first reaction was “a burning heat” in his brain, a headache so intense it kept him awake for days.

Then, though, he reconsidered. “I felt pleased,” he wrote, “that I might now make better drawings than before.”

We know the results – Audubon turned himself into the most famous practitioner of what some call “bird art.” Copies of his “Birds of America,” published section by section in the mid-19th century, are among the most valuable illustrated books.

But Audubon was only one of a number of naturalist artists who have made their careers portraying birds. And in his day, before cameras or reliable preservation techniques, bird artists gathered and recorded important scientific information about the ornithological world.

For Audubon, his colleagues and rivals, the ability to observe their surroundings and draw what they saw was not just a prerequisite for making and selling art. Observation and illustration were important tools of research.

Four new books illuminate the confluence of science, art and ornithology, which flowered perhaps most brilliantly in Audubon's day, although it had ancient roots. The art of depicting birds emerged in the cave culture of Paleolithic times. The first drawing of a bird (that we know about) was of an owl, found on the wall of a cave in Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, France, in 1994.

And though sketching may have given way to the high-technology tools of zoology, the authors of three books agree that drawing and painting continue to be superior tools for people seeking to learn about birds. If you find that hard to believe, consider that many contemporary birders prefer the field guide drawings of Roger Tory Peterson and David Allen Sibley to guides relying on photography.

All three of these books are filled with glorious images of drawn and painted birds, fascinating anecdotes about how the images were made and odd facts. Edward Lear, for example, the master of the limerick, was an accomplished bird artist who considered this work his true calling.

But there is much more than beautiful images and bird-art trivia. In “Humans, Nature and Birds: Science Art From Cave Walls to Computer Screens” (Yale University Press), Darryl Wheye, a California artist, and Donald Kennedy, an ecologist and emeritus president of Stanford, take a close look at humanity's relationship with birds.

Wheye and Kennedy, also the former editor of the journal Science, have collected bird art ranging from the cave painting of an owl to a portrait of the ivory-billed woodpecker, which appeared on the cover of Science in 2005 to accompany a report, much criticized since, that an ivory-bill had been observed in an Arkansas swamp and that the species was not extinct after all.